Tuesday

Aug 21, 2018 at 4:36 PMAug 21, 2018 at 4:37 PM

Silver Screams is a loud band, a punk band, one that leans more toward old-school punk than anything contemporary. Once you hear their music – either live or on their EPs “Defective Machines” and “Creep Joint Scratch” – it’s no surprise to learn that all three members are fans of Joy Division, T.S.O.L., The Damned, and that ilk.

Even their name is a clue as to what they’re all about. It comes from the nasty breakup song by The Damned called “Alone,” which begins, “Lying in a wiped out park, with silver screams from the dark.”

Though they get a kick out of putting their own stamp on covers now and then, among them Joy Vision’s “Disorder” and “Crocodiles” by Echo and the Bunnymen, the trio will likely be playing mostly originals when they headline at the Midway Café in Jamaica Plain on Aug. 25.

Made up of Earthdog (Sean Koepenick, from Walpole) on bass, Niff (Mike Cuniff, from Danvers) on guitar and lead vocals, and Snarly (Pete Gamache, from Cambridge) on drums, Silver Screams began playing together in 2012. The seeds of them becoming a band grew from a strange set of circumstances.

“I’m from D.C. and my wife is from Needham,” said Koepenick, who admits, with a laugh, that his first instrument was guitar but he thought it was too much work to learn, so he switched to bass “because it had two less strings.”

“She and I met in D.C., and moved up here in 2011. I went to see some bands play at a local skate park, and one of them was Mike’s previous band, By the Throat. I didn’t know him, but I noticed that his guitar case had a sticker of my old band Sleeper Agent. I later emailed him and said, ‘It’s strange to see a sticker from a small underground D.C. band in Boston. Where did you get it?’ He said that he saw us play in Baltimore when we opened for Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. He also said that By the Throat was about to break up and he was looking to do something different. We got together and played, and then we got a drummer who Mike played with in a Misfits cover band. That was Pete.”

They clicked really quickly, first taking the stage in the fall of 2012 at the Middle East Down in Cambridge.

“Dave Smalley, one of my friends from D.C., was in the band Down By Law at the time,” said Koepenick. “They were headlining at the Middle East. I called in a favor, and they hooked us up for our first show.”

Of course, making music isn’t the way most people pay the rent, so all three bandmates have day jobs: Koepenick is in sales at a software company, Cuniff is in digital marketing, and Gamache is a chief technology officer. But after hours, they rock out. And they’ve done it before at the Midway.

“Since we started, we’ve been playing there at least a couple of times a year,” said Koepenick. “We get a good crowd there, it’s an intimate place, and we can pick and choose what other bands we want to play with. It’s also one of the places where we don’t have to turn the sound down; we get a really good sound there, even though we’re at a high volume.”

On the news front, Silver Screams has a brand new three-song CD titled “Alive in the Afterlife,” and they’re constantly coming up with new material for a future release.

“We’re working on that,” said Koepenick. “It probably won’t be till next year that we’d be able to get in and record it, but we definitely want to do a full-length album next time.”

Sons of Serendip, made up of vocalist Micah Christian, cellist-vocalist Kendall Ramseur, harpist Mason Morton, and pianist Cordaro Rodriguez, play jazzy originals as well as interpretations of popular songs at the Regattabar in Cambridge. (7:30 p.m.)

Aug. 31:

The jazz and folk octet The Dustbowl Survival will add edges of soul, funk, and rock to their repertoire at The Center for Arts in Natick. (8 p.m.)